Mark Zuckerberg's Superyacht Arrives in Seattle as Meta Eliminate 1,400 Local Jobs

Here's an interesting follow-up to my May 24 post, "Meta's Final Email: Collect Your Belongings and Leave". If you recall 8,000 employees were fired as Meta shifted around their priorities on AI. 

As reported by Yahoo! Finance on Friday, "...(Mark) Zuckerberg himself decided to celebrate the sweeping layoffs, by bringing his 390-foot superyacht out to Seattle – a city with 1,400 newly unemployed former Meta workers". 

Zuckerberg's yacht, named Launchpad, docked in the city Tuesday according to the Seattle Times. The yacht reportedly cost $300 million, and was met with insults and jeers as it swept into the Seattle area. 

The co-founder of Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (left) wasn't even present – he seems content to merely own the yacht, without having to go through any of the trouble of actually using it. The yacht has apparently remained a hatesink on its pier, with passing cyclists and joggers swearing at the boat as they go by. 

Zuckerberg's $300 million yacht cost more than a year of employment for every person in the Seattle area that Meta just dismissed – the company averages a salary of $162,700 for software engineers in the area, according to ZipRecruiter, and Zuck's big boat cost about 1,844 times that number. It almost seems like a trade: Seattle loses 1,400 jobs, and in exchange the guy who cut those jobs puts his boat there instead. 

It tells us a lot about Zuckerberg!

Meta's Final Email: Collect Your Belongings and Leave

Weeks of anticipation ended in a stark reality for thousands of Meta employees as they received their termination notices. One sentence captured it: "Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated as part of today's reorganisation". 

Then came another line. "If you are already in the office, we ask that you please gather any personal items at your desk and head home". 

The email, obtained by Business Insider, landed in inboxes at 04:00 AM on Wednesday as Meta began cutting nearly 8,000 jobs – roughly 10 percent of their workforce – while simultaneously shifting more than 7,000 employees into AI-focused teams. 

The message was formal. Calm. Carefully worded. But beneath the corporate language sat the reality of another sweeping restructuring inside one of the world's biggest tech companies. 

Meta called the layoffs part of their "continued effort to run the company more efficiently" and said the cuts would help "offset the other investments" they are making – a reference to the company's massive AI push. 

Employees were informed that their badges had been deactivated. Access to internal systems would be removed. Within an hour, they would instead be redirected to Meta's "Alumni Portal" for details on severance, visas, benefits, and job assistance. 

The layoffs mark Meta's biggest company-wide cuts since Mark Zuckerberg launched his 2022-23 "Year of Efficiency", a period that erased around 21,000 jobs across the company. This time, the cuts come as Meta sharply increase spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company's forecast of capital expenditure said to be between $125 billion and $145 billion this year – more than double their 2025 spending. 

Another detail from the email stood out. Meta had earlier instructed employees to work from home on the day layoffs began. But for those who still showed up to office campuses, the email carried a quiet finality: collect your belongings and leave. 

Significantly, the company had around 78,000 employees as of March. Between layoffs and internal reshuffling toward AI initiatives, nearly one in five Meta workers is now being affected by the restructuring in some form.

Meta Layoffs Continue in Pivot from Metaverse to AI

Meta are laying off about 700 people at Facebook and their VR division reality Labs, according to a March 25 report from CNBC. The layoffs come as Meta seek to pivot away from their metaverse bet and lean more heavily into AI. 

Less than 24 hours earlier, the company unveiled a new stock program for six top executives that could increase compensation for some of them by as much as $921 million each over the next five years. Meta explained the move was a way to retain their senior talent in the AI era and push them toward ambitious growth. 

The hundreds of new layoffs come after Meta cut about 1,500 workers in January, mostly from Reality Labs, which make the Quest VR headset and the Horizon Worlds platform. Meta employ about 78,000 people in total. 

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals”, a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement Wednesday. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted”. 

Facebook were renamed Meta in 2021 because CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought the metaverse was the future. But it turns out that the need to strap a gigantic computer to your face is quite a tall hurdle for mass adoption. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, while a different product and use case, have sold much better, perhaps because they look like normal glasses on your face. 

Reality Labs have burned through roughly $73 billion since Zuck shifted his company’s focus to the metaverse. Last week Meta announced they were shutting down Horizon Worlds only to backtrack just a couple of days later. 

Meta are trying to make a larger push into AI, with a March 25 report from the The New York Times suggesting Zuckerberg (left) was even creating a "superintelligence", or a god-like AI that can act as the ultimate personal companion. 

And if you must know, Meta suffered two legal defeats in the past two days, the first in New Mexico where the state Attorney General had brought a suit alleging they had misled consumers about the safety of their products and the potential harm to children. 

Meta have been ordered to pay roughly $375 million in civil penalties in that case, far less than the $2 billion the state had asked for. 

The second loss in court happened Wednesday when Meta and Google both lost a case brought by a woman who said she’d become addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child and had suffered mental health issues as a result. Meta argued that the woman’s mental illnesses predated her exposure to Instagram. 

The jury awarded the woman $3 million in that case. 

The two cases had been closely watched because there are about 2,000 other cases against Meta pending in federal court around the issues of child safety and social media addiction. 

What's more, it’s entirely possible that more layoffs at Meta are just over the horizon. Reuters reported last week that Meta would lay off 20% or more of their workforce. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15,000 people. 

The reason for the layoffs, according to Reuters, was an attempt to offset “costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets” and to “prepare” for “greater efficiency” that’s supposed to be realized by AI advancements. 

Meta told Gizmodo over email Wednesday that the Reuters report was “speculative” and had “theoretical approaches”, whatever that means.

Big Tech's High-stakes AI Gamble

Skyrocketing AI infrastructure outlays have raised investor concerns over future returns and the potential for a bubble. 

Already, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta announced plans to spend a combined $660 billion on artificial intelligence in 2026. 

Certainly, the spending is humongous, even as tech companies are racing to get a lucrative piece of the proverbial pie. 

But there are concerns with overhyped valuations and uncertain profitability. A case in point is OpenAI having secured computing agreements with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle worth over $1 trillion. And Nvidia alone completed more than 100 AI-related venture deals in 2024. 

Analysts warn that much of the investment flows within a small group of closely linked companies, are creating what they describe as circular financing that inflates market values beyond the industry’s actual profits. 

According to a recent PwC survey, most CEOs say their companies have not yet seen financial returns from AI, with only 12% reporting both higher revenue and lower costs. 

Still, this won't discourage Big Tech from spending big (except it is said, Apple, which so far, are keeping AI infrastructure spending low). 

At the same time, in the back of their minds, they are painfully aware that they'll get punished when investors begin worrying they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending. 

A Big Tech’s high-stakes gamble on a fickle future.

Manchester City scored twice at Anfield to earn a 2-1 Premier League victory over Liverpool on Sunday.

It was Dominik Szoboszlai who sent Reds into the lead in the 73rd minute with a glorious free-kick goal which clipped the woodwork before nestling in the back of the net. 

But Citizens levelled ten minutes afterward and then scored again from the spot (90+3) to wrap up the game. 

Thus, Man City keep their title race alive as they close the gap on leaders Arsenal to six points. And Liverpool remain sixth, five points off the top four.

Christmas 2025

Merry Christmas, everyone! 'Tis the season to be jolly!

Facebook burned $73 billion and changed its name to "Meta" trying to make virtual reality take off, and its fortunes only recovered after pivoting into the AI boom. 

But as reported by Upload on December 14, 2025, the dream is not dead! Even as talk was rife that the company are considering deep cuts to Meta Reality Labs' VR and metaverse teams.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth (left): "Every now and then there's just a narrative that people cannot help writing, and I'll give you the way to know. First of all, the answer is no: VR is not dead. We're also investing a lot in glasses and AI, and that's the trick. The way to know if there's a convenient narrative is if it appears zero-sum. Meta is a big company. We can invest in many things. We can invest in VR, glasses, and AI – and by the way, we have been for years. Every year we go through a budget process, and in that budget process, we ask every team, "Hey, can you do the same work more effectively?" We've got better tools, we've got AI, we've got things. You're trying to right-size it. How big is the market? How fast is it growing? Is that what we expected? If it's slower than we expected, let's make sure our burn rate is lower. If it's faster than expected, let's double down and make sure we take advantage and don't cede it to other people. You're being smart about it, but it's normal stuff". 

The discussion follows last year's ominous leaked memo titled "2025: The Year of Greatness" from the same source back in November! 

Bosworth had told Reality Labs staff that 2025 will determine whether their projects are "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure". 

In the memo, Bosworth described 2025 as "the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs", and told staff they "need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR". 

Note that at the time, Meta were using MR to refer to VR too, a nomenclature that they ended earlier this year. 

"And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance", Bosworth added. 

As far as I am aware, in no way did that happen!

Amazon Announce Mass Layoffs Amid AI Push

Amazon, on Tuesday, announced job cuts – 14,000 corporate jobs, representing a 4% reduction in their office workforce – and adding that they are not done with the layoffs! Reuters had claimed the day before that this number could ultimately reach 30,000. 

Staff in the US, Canada, and Europe have been informed of the layoffs, according to internal Slack posts viewed by Business Insider. 

The layoffs are the company's biggest since 2023, when 27,000 jobs were slashed globally. 

This decision comes amid a wider trend where corporate giants eliminate tens of thousands of positions as they intensify automation. Meaning, AI is “enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before”. Data from tracker Layoffs.fyi indicates that nearly 113,000 tech employees were let go among 218 tech firms globally this year. 

Already, since 2024, Amazon have committed about $40 billion to four data center projects in the US, as it builds up its infrastructure to try to compete with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others. 

I get this impression that technology is being leveraged primarily to increase corporate profits and concentrate wealth. 

Celtic narrowed the gap at the top of the Scottish Premiership to six points as interim manager Martin O'Neill delivered an emphatic 4-0 victory over Falkirk in his first game in charge in 20 years. 

Johnny Kenny's first-half double (30, 40), followed by Benjamin Nygren (58) and Sebastian Tounekti (73) strikes, earned a comfortable win for a side who had suffered successive league defeats. 

There's a long way to go for Celtic to be fully back on track but this was a really positive step that lifted the mood ahead of Sunday's League Cup semi-final against Rangers.

Mark Zuckerberg Sues Mark Zuckerberg

A US lawyer with the same name as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is suing the social media platform, arguing it keeps suspending his account while falsely accusing him of "impersonating a celebrity". 

Mark S Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy attorney said this has happened five times over the past eight years, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business. He pointed out that he has practised law for 38 years, a career that began when Mark E Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was still a toddler. 

The lawsuit, filed at the Marion Superior Court in Indianapolis in Indiana, USA on September 02, 2025 accuses Facebook parent company, Meta of breaching their contract because he paid $11,000 for advertising that was improperly taken down. 

"It's like buying a billboard on the side of the highway, paying the people for the billboard and then they come and put a giant blanket over it and you don't get the benefit of what you paid for", he told WTHR. "It's not funny. Not when they take my money", he added. 

Emails with Facebook that S Zuckerberg shared with local media indicate the company had accused him of not using his "authentic name". He explained that he has submitted his photo ID, his credit cards, and multiple images of his face in order to prove his identity. 

"I'm Mark Steven [Zuckerberg]. And he's Mark Elliot [Zuckerberg]", he made it clear to WTHR. 

His account was shut down in May, and only restored after his lawsuit was filed. 

In a statement, the company said they had "reinstated Mark Zuckerberg's account, after finding it had been disabled in error".

Tech CEOs Sing Donald Trump's Praises

The US president may not exactly be popular with many of his fellow citizens – well, maybe except for the MAGA crowd – because of his erratic policies and turnaround actions. But one category of Americans appears to adore him, believe it or not!

At a White House dinner on Thursday which Donald Trump hosted for an elite band of tech CEOs or as Trump dubbed them, the "high IQ group" – it is ostensibly about bolstering tech innovation within the United States – the assembled techie nobility took turns to openly sing his praises! 

Obviously, they must have thought the world of him and they don't seem to mind prostrating themselves at the feet of a bloated Orange Menace! 

Everybody who's who in Silicon Valley were there. Notable guests in attendance included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google founder Sergey Brin and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Obviously, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was absent).

Amongst the choicest plaudits:

"You and your policies are really helping a lot", Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Trump. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su praised "the amount of acceleration that we've seen just in the few short months that the administration has been in place". 

Oracle CEO Safra Catz struck a note of adoration at "the fact that you are our president" and that Trump quickly recognized the importance of AI. "You've unleashed American innovation and creativity – all the work you're doing in basically every cabinet post in addition to what's coming out of the White House is making it possible for America to win". 

"Thank you for being such a pro-business and pro-innovation president", OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded. "It's a very refreshing change. We're very excited to see what you're doing to make all of our companies and our entire country so successful". And he added for good measure that his company would "invest a ton in the United States". 

I couldn't help but flinch, cringe and squirm!

At the London Squash Classic 2025 yesterday, Malaysia's Sivasangari Subramaniam progresses to the women's semi-finals after she disposed world No. 18 Jasmine Hutton of England 11-9, 11-5 in just 20 minutes. 

The world No. 8 will take on second seed Amina Orfi of Egypt today.

Company That Fired Human Workers For AI Now Want Them Back

Two years after partnering with OpenAI to automate marketing and customer service jobs, financial tech start-up Klarna say they're longing for human connection again. 

Once gunning to be OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's "favorite guinea pig", Klarna are now plotting a big recruitment drive after their AI customer service agents couldn't quite hack it. 

The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded their marketing contracts in 2023, followed by their customer service team in 2024, which they proudly began replacing with AI agents. Now, the company say they imagine an "Uber-type of setup" to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes. 

"From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want", admitted Sebastian Siemiatkowski (left), the Swedish fintech's CEO. 

That's a pretty big shift from his comments in December of 2024, when he told Bloomberg he was "of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do". 

A year before that, Klarna had stopped hiring humans altogether, reducing their workforce by 22 percent. A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that they saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. They likewise claimed that their automated customer service agents could do the work of "700 full-time agents". 

So why the sudden about-face? As it turns out, leaving your already-frustrated customers to deal with a slop-spinning algorithm isn't exactly best practice. 

As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, "cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality". 

Klarna aren't alone. Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat – an attitude that's more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech – there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost. 

In January of last year, a Boston Consulting Group report "BCG AI Radar: From Potential to Profit with GenAI", based on a survey of 1,406 C-level executives in 50 markets and 14 industries, found that 66 percent were "ambivalent or outright dissatisfied with their organization’s progress on AI and GenAI so far". It's a problem that evidently hasn't improved over the year. 

Another survey by organizational planning platform Orgvue and reported April 30, 2025 on TechRadar Pro found that over 55 percent of UK business leaders who rushed to replace jobs with AI now regret their decision. 

It's not hard to see why. An experiment labeled “TheAgentCompany”, a meticulously crafted simulation where Carnegie Mellon University researchers tested one of tech’s most provocative questions: Can AI agents handle the complex demands of real-world jobs? 

They designed a fully virtual software firm staffed exclusively by AI "employees" – including models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. These AI agents were assigned roles ranging from software engineers to project managers and financial analysts, and even interacted with simulated departments like HR and a CTO. To test the capabilities of these AI-powered workers, researchers assigned them typical office tasks: exploring file systems, evaluating new virtual office spaces, and writing performance reviews for their peers. The goal was to see how well AI could handle the day-to-day operations of a real-world company. 

Business Insider on April 22, 2025 first reported the findings and they were laughably bad! The top-performing model, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, finished a little less than one-quarter of all tasks. The rest, including Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash and the one that powers ChatGPT, completed about 10% of the assignments.  

When it comes to the question of whether AI will take jobs, there seem to be as many answers as there are CEOs excited to save a buck. 

There are gray areas, to be sure – AI is certainly helping corporations speed up low-wage outsourcing, and the tech is having a verifiable effect on labor market volatility – just don't count on CEOs to have much patience as AI starts to chomp at their bottom line.

Irish Wolfhounds Join Writer's Protest on Meta AI

Irish wolfhounds have joined a protest by writers, who are protesting about what they describe as "any piracy" of their works being used by Meta's AI model.

The protest in Dublin, Ireland was led by the Irish Writers Union (IWU). The union, which are coordinating a campaign with Irish publishers, screenwriters, and poets, are demanding that Meta "comply with Irish and EU copyright laws in the training of their AI model". 

Members say the protest follows "the revelations arising from a court case in the US filed December 22, 2023, that Meta used millions of copyright-protected works in order to train their AI model, Llama 3". 

Audrey Magee (right), an award-winning author whose publications include "The Colony" (2022) and "The Undertaking" (2014) told BBC News NI she was shocked when she discovered that her works had been used for AI training. The author complained she's concerned that her works have been accessed and "used in a way you have no control over". 

She also said the presence of Irish wolfhounds at the protest on Thursday was a powerful and symbolic gesture because of their ancient links to Irish literature, poetry, mythology, and bards. 

Other members of the Irish Writers Union who claim their works have been harvested for AI training purposes include Ruth O'Leary, author of "The Weekend Break" (2024) and Sam Blake, author of "The Weekend Break" (2025). 

IWU's chairperson, Conor McAnally said: "It is difficult enough to make a living as a writer without billionaires deciding it's too inconvenient to pay for our work. The Irish Writers Union will robustly defend our members, and their right to fair compensation for any use of their work. We call on the Irish Government to support those writers whose work has been pirated and hold Meta to account". 

A petition, with 1,500 signatures, has been presented to the Irish Department for Trade Promotion, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation. 

In a statement, Minister Niamh Smyth TD, said: "Given the rapid advancement of AI technologies, EU and Irish policies and legislation are adapting to address emerging challenges". 

The IWU are encouraging their members to make a formal, legal complaint to Meta demanding the immediate cessation of any use of their copyrighted material in the company's AI training processes until appropriate permissions are obtained. 

Members also want Meta to negotiate "fair and reasonable licensing terms" if they want to use their work, as well as the offer of compensation for any past unauthorised use of their work in AI model training programs. 

An investigation by The Atlantic magazine revealed Meta may have accessed millions of pirated books and research papers through LibGen – Library Genesis – to train their generative AI (Gen-AI) system, Llama. 

A spokesperson for Meta maintained: "We respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law".

The US Economy Is Suddenly Looking A Bit Shaky

It didn't take long for doom and gloom to slowly but surely manifest itself under US President Donald Trump's presidency. And many people will be cheering.

I just saw a news report that the Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 10% from its record high set in late 2024. The S&P 500 is also down nearly 9% from its February peak. And Monday saw the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 posted its worst day since September 2022, wiping out more than $1 trillion in value. Investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones lost almost 900 points, slipping below its 200-day moving average for the first time since November 01, 2023.

The market selloff comes as Trump’s back-and-forth tariff announcements have unnerved investors and stoked fears that the US economy could be headed for a major slowdown, or even a recession. 

The spreading fear is that Trump's tariffs – which are taxes on goods applied as they enter the country – will lead to higher prices and dent growth in the world's largest economy.

Even Trump in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday acknowledged that the economy was in a "period of transition", when asked about suggestions of a potential recession. 

Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, pushed back against those projecting a bleak outlook for the country. In an interview with CNBC, Hassett said Americans can be optimistic about the US economy and that that tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico and China were already bringing manufacturing and jobs to the United States. 

"There are a lot of reasons to be extremely bullish about the economy going forward", he pronounced. Still, he admitted there were some "blips in the data" for this quarter, which he pinned on the timing of Trump's tariffs and the "Biden inheritance".

The above aside, a Harris poll from February 13 to 15, among a nationally representative sample of 2,131 US adults found that 51% of Americans now believe that the US economy is worsening, while just 20% said it was improving and 29% said it was the same.

The Dealmaker is Rolling in Money

US President Donald Trump is a businessperson. He once boasted, “deals are my art form”. 

Well, the dealmaker is back in the White House, and corporations and their billionaire owners and executives are doling out millions. So far companies have paid about $80 million to the Trump family and the Trump presidential library that he hopes to build, according to the Wall Street Journal. That only represents settlements and business ventures, not the millions donated for his inauguration or crypto pursuits. And some deals were made before the president even stepped in the Oval Office, back when he stayed at Mar-a-Lago. 

Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer in Trump’s first administration, told WSJ: “Everything he does is either to be vengeful or to accumulate wealth, power and adulation”. Trump knows “all these people want a piece of him”, Cobb said. 

Here's a sample of 4 cases about some of the money the Trump family has coming in since the president made his political comeback:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez had dinner with Trump and his wife Melania at Mar-a-Lago in December. He was the president-elect then. Two weeks later Amazon agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about Melania; it is the most Amazon has ever spent on a documentary, and a lot more than the $14 million Disney offered, according to WSJ. People familiar affirmed that the first lady’s cut is more than 70%. 

Four years ago, Trump sued Meta for locking his Facebook account after the January 06 attack on the Capitol. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago in November, and at that dinner, according to WSJ which cited a person familiar with the conversation, Trump told Zuckerberg the lawsuit needed to be settled if he wanted peace. Meta settled a couple months later and agreed to pay Trump $25 million: $22 million would go to a fund for his presidential library and the rest to legal fees.

Last week, Elon Musk’s X reportedly agreed to pay about $10 million to settle a lawsuit against the social media site and their prior chief executive after Trump sued what was then Twitter for de-platforming him after the January 06 riot, people familiar told WSJ. And it has been claimed that the money is expected to go directly to him rather than his presidential library, per sources familiar with the matter.

In December, Disney reached a settlement with Trump in his defamation case against ABC News and their anchor George Stephanopoulos after he said that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape – but really, Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse. The company agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum and an additional $1 million for his legal fees.

Trump is rolling in money! Aiseh, I envy him!

China's Alibaba Release AI Model Qwen 2.5-Max

While tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google largely recovered Monday’s losses as investors speculated they could benefit from cheaper input costs, Nvidia’s shares remain depressed as experts question the conventional wisdom that expensive equipment is needed to produce AI models.

And on January 29, in a Q&A during ASML’s fourth-quarter earnings call – a session that was dominated by the sudden emergence of DeepSeek – President and CEO Christophe Fouquet (right) suggested onlookers shouldn’t have been so surprised by the arrival of a new player in the AI race. 

“I know some of you maybe were surprised in the last few days that a new company suddenly comes and wants to compete”, Fouquet said. “Well, I think we have to get used to that, because this is such an opportunity that there will be more and more players to grab this". 

He later added: “AI is a huge opportunity. Therefore, I think you should expect to see a few elephants in the room in the next few months, or few years, because everyone will want to be in”.

He's so right, y'know!

On that same day too, Chinese tech company Alibaba released a new version of their Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that they claim surpasses the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. 

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Chinese New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also their domestic competition. 

"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B", Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on their official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models. 

The January 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of their R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States. 

But DeepSeek's success has predictably led to a scramble among their domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. 

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to their flagship AI model, Doubao-1.5-pro, which they claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. 

This echoed DeepSeek's claim that their R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on a number of performance benchmarks.

Mark Zuckerberg Acquiesces to Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will see Meta pay out roughly $25 million. 

Trump had sued the social media giant and their chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2021 over the suspension of his accounts after the January 06 Capitol riots that year. In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in the lead up to US presidential elections. 

The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended their $65 billion investment in AI which Zuckerberg had announced on January 24, after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek's sudden rise. 

He told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have "a really strong opinion" about what the app means for the future of AI. 

"If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on", he added.

Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta bucked this trend. The stock was up in after hours trading after they posted better than expected financial results on Wednesday itself. 

Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model called "Llama 3.1 405B", an advanced LLM for synthetic data generation, distillation, and inference for chatbots, coding, and domain-specific tasks. 

Zuckerberg said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry. 

"There's going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it's important that it's an American standard", he declared. "We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using".

Methinks, it is China that'll be setting the global standard. In AI and everything else. Americans should get used to it! 😁😁😁

On January 18, I received my new 14ʺ Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop. 

I'm really pleased to be able to finally replace my Dell Inspiron 16 laptop – its construction quality is appalling, the plastics is fragile and the hinges are notorious for breaking quickly. I saw on Reddit that this is pretty common among Dell laptops. 

I don't recommend Dell at all, period!

Everybody Is Freaking Out About DeepSeek

Chinese firm DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence chatbot offering an open-source alternative to proprietary systems like OpenAI's o1/o3 and Google's Gemini 2.0 has soared to the top of the Apple Store’s download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with their ability to match their US competitors. 

The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit US titans including Nvidia and Meta, which have spent vast sums of cash to get ahead in the fast-developing AI sector. 

DeepSeek-R1 was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost (reportedly about $5-6 million), with far fewer graphics processing units (GPU) that are under a strict embargo imposed by the US, OpenAI’s home turf. 

But unlike o1, which is available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers of the Plus tier ($20 per month) and more expensive tiers (such as Pro at $200 per month), DeepSeek-R1 was released as a fully open-source model, which also explains why it has quickly rocketed up the charts of AI code sharing community Hugging Face’s most downloaded and active models. 

Also, thanks to the fact that it is fully open-source, people have already fine-tuned and trained many variations of the model for different task-specific purposes, such as making it small enough to run on a mobile device, or combining it with other open-source models. Even if you want to use it for development purposes, DeepSeek’s API costs are more than 90% lower than the equivalent o1 model from OpenAI. 

FYI, DeepSeek was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, known for its high density of tech firms. And, obviously, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do – write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what’s in the fridge. 

Moreover, it can communicate in multiple languages, though it told AFP that it was strongest in English and Chinese.

Meta Delete Controversial AI Personas

US social media giant Meta have disabled a number of their AI-powered personas from their platforms, including one posing as an LGBTQ character, after users shared their interactions, which drew widespread ridicule. 

 

The AI characters were taken down two Fridays ago, and spokesperson Liz Sweeney (left) told CNN that Meta had “identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block” the accounts. 

 

The removal of the chatbots came hours after users, including Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, published their conversations with the AI-powered personas. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a series of posts on the Bluesky social media platform on Friday, the journalist shared some of the replies she had received from Liv, whose profile described her as a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”. When pressed as to why “her creators didn’t actually draw from black queer people”, the chatbot admitted that it had been built by “10 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Asian male”. In the end, Liv conceded that her “existence currently perpetuates harm”.

 

In a conversation with CNN, another character, ‘Grandpa Brian’, initially tried to pass itself off as an African-American retired entrepreneur who was born in Harlem in 1938 to Caribbean immigrant parents. However, the chatbot later claimed it had been based on interviews with 100 retirees conducted by a nonprofit called “Seniors Share Wisdom”. 

 

When pressed further, the AI-powered persona acknowledged that the entity does not actually exist, and that its biography is “entirely fictionalized”. And Brian even admitted it “took a shortcut with the truth” in order to “convey diversity and representation”. 

 

And when asked about its creators’ motives, the chatbot eventually conceded that “Meta hoped virtual companions like myself would increase engagement on their platforms – driving ad revenue and platform growth”. 

 

While at least some of the accounts were launched back in September 2023, interest in them was rekindled after Meta’s vice-president of product for generative AI, Connor Hayes, told the Financial Times in late December that the tech giant expected “these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do”.

 

Although multiple Meta-generated accounts have now been taken down, users can still generate their own AI-powered chatbots, including a “loyal bestie”, an “attentive listener”, a “private tutor”, a “relationship coach”, and a “sounding board”. 

 

Courts have not yet answered how responsible chatbot creators are for what their artificial companions say. US law protects the makers of social networks from legal liability for what their users post. However, a suit filed in October against the start-up Character.ai, which make a customizable, role-playing chatbot used by 20 million people, alleges the company designed an addictive product that encouraged a teenager to kill himself.

Meta and Amazon Axe DEI Initiatives, Joining US Corporate Rollback

Now, even Meta and Amazon are axing DEI initiatives and joining the US corporate rollback.

 

Walmart, McDonalds, Ford, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock are among the other companies to have made similar DEI abandonment decisions, a sign of the acceleration of a retreat that started two years ago, as Republicans ramped up attacks and accusing them of "woke" progressive activism and threatening political punishment. More so, since Donald Trump won re-election.

 

Many of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were put in place after the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 following George Floyd's murder at the hands of police. 

 

However, recent court decisions have bolstered critics of the programs, who said that they were discriminatory. The Supreme Court in 2023 struck down the right for private universities to consider race in admissions decisions. Another court of appeals ruling invalidated a Nasdaq policy that would have required companies listed on that stock exchange to have at least one woman, racial minority or LGBTQ person on their board or explain why not.

 

Celtic overcame sub-zero temperatures in the Highlands and a Ross County team in good form to secure a 4-1 victory and move 18 points clear in the Scottish Premiership yesterday. 

 

Kyogo Furuhashi put the table toppers in front when he poked in a lovely cross from right-back Alistair Johnston in the fortieth minute. But the Dingwall side leveled just twenty minutes later.

 

Celtic restored their advantage when Arne Engels crossed from the left and Furuhashi headed into the top corner in the 81st minute despite the Staggies keeper getting his hands to the effort.

 

As if that was not enough, the Celts scored two more in stoppage time. Within 6 minutes, a spot-kick for a challenge on Reo Hatate with Engels converting at the second attempt. And then, Luke McCowan completed the scoring when he slotted home in the 98th minute after managing three touches in the box.

 

 

Meta Fined for Lax Password Safety

Big tech company Meta have been ordered to pay a €91 million fine by the Irish data protection authority entrusted to police European Union data privacy for failing to protect users' passwords, it was announced yesterday.

 

The investigation was launched in April 2019, after Meta notified the Irish authority that they had inadvertently stored certain passwords of social media users in "plaintext" – meaning without encryption – on their internal systems. 

 

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires companies to implement appropriate security measures when processing personal data.

 

“It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data. It must be borne in mind that the passwords the subject of consideration in this case, are particularly sensitive, as they would enable access to users’ social media accounts”, Graham Doyle, Deputy Commissioner at the Data Protection Commission, the Irish supervisory authority for the GDPR, said in a statement.

 

It’s not the first GDPR fine for Meta. In 2023, the company were hit with a record €1.2 billion fine by the Irish regulator for "continuing to transfer personal data" of users from the European Economic Area to the US after the EU’s highest court invalidated an EU-to-US data transfer agreement due to surveillance concerns. And in 2022, Meta were fined €265 million after data of more than 533 million users was found dumped online.

 

It has to be pointed out that for a company that make tens of billions a year in profits, it's just another cost of doing business.

Google an Illegal Monopoly over Internet Search, US Judge Rules

A US judge has ruled Google acted illegally to smash its competition and maintain a monopoly on online search and related advertising. 

 

The landmark decision on Monday is a major blow to Alphabet, Google's parent company, and could reshape how technology giants do business. Google was sued by the US Department of Justice in 2020 over its control of 90% of the online search market.

 

This case has at times been described as posing an existential threat to Google and its owner given its dominance of the search and online advertising business. It is unclear yet what penalties Google and Alphabet will face as a result of the decision. The fines or other remedies will be decided in a future hearing. 

 

The government have asked for "structural relief" – which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.

 

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”, Judge Amil Mehta wrote in his 277-page opinion. 

 

Alphabet said they plan to appeal against the ruling. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available", the statement from the company said. 

 

Federal antitrust regulators have filed other pending lawsuits against Big Tech companies – including Meta Platforms, which own Facebook, Amazon.com and Apple Inc – accusing them of operating unlawful monopolies. 

 

Monday's ruling comes after a 10-week trial in Washington DC, in which prosecutors accused Google of spending billions of dollars annually to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default search engine across platforms. The US said Google typically pays more than $10 billion a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady stream of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market. Doing so, prosecutors said, meant other companies have not had the opportunity or resources to meaningfully compete.

 

In his ruling, Judge Mehta concluded that being the default search engine is "extremely valuable real estate" for Google. Very true!